The Master Algorithm Quotes

“You can download the learner I’ve just described from alchemy.cs .washington.edu.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Our goal is to figure out the simplest program we can write such that it will continue to write itself by reading data, without limit, until it knows everything there is to know.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Data alone is not enough. Starting from scratch will only get you to scratch.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Michelangelo said that all he did was see the statue inside the block of marble and carve away the excess stone until the statue was revealed. Likewise, an algorithm carves away the excess transistors in the computer until the intended function is revealed, whether it’s an airliner’s autopilot or a new Pixar movie. An”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“In many cases we can do this and avoid the exponential blowup. Suppose you’re leading a platoon in single file through enemy territory in the dead of night, and you want to make sure that all your soldiers are still with you. You could stop and count them yourself, but that wastes too much time. A cleverer solution is to just ask the first soldier behind you: “How many soldiers are behind you?” Each soldier asks the next the same question, until the last one says “None.” The next-to-last soldier can now say “One,” and so on all the way back to the first soldier, with each soldier adding one to the number of soldiers behind him. Now you know how many soldiers are still with you, and you didn’t even have to stop. Siri uses the same idea to compute the probability that you just said, “Call the police” from the sounds it picked up from the microphone. Think of “Call the police” as a platoon of words marching across the page in single file. Police wants to know its probability, but for that it needs to know the probability of the; and the in turn needs to know the probability of call. So call computes its probability and passes it on to the, which does the same and passes the result to police. Now police knows its probability, duly influenced by every word in the sentence, but we never had to construct the full table of eight possibilities (the first word is call or isn’t, the second is the or isn’t, and the third is police or isn’t). In reality, Siri considers all words that could appear in each position, not just whether the first word is call or not and so on, but the algorithm is the same. Perhaps Siri thinks, based on the sounds, that the first word was either call or tell, the second was the or her, and the third was police or please. Individually, perhaps the most likely words are call, the, and please. But that forms the nonsensical sentence “Call the please,” so taking the other words into account, Siri concludes that the sentence is really “Call the police.” It makes the call, and with luck the police get to your house in time to catch the burglar.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Knowledge is traded in both directions—manually entered knowledge for use in learners, induced knowledge for addition to knowledge bases—but at the end of the day the rationalist-empiricist fault line runs right down that border, and crossing it is not easy.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Noise in machine learning just means errors in the data, or random events that you can’t predict.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Machine learning takes many different forms and goes by many different names: pattern recognition, statistical modeling, data mining, knowledge discovery, predictive analytics, data science, adaptive systems, self-organizing systems, and more.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Every algorithm has an input and an output: the data goes into the computer, the algorithm does what it will with it, and out comes the result. Machine learning turns this around: in goes the data and the desired result and out comes the algorithm that turns one into the other. Learning algorithms—also known as learners—are algorithms that make other algorithms. With machine learning, computers write their own programs, so we don’t have to.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“(As Richard Feynman said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”)”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Armed with machine learning, a manager becomes a supermanager, a scientist a superscientist, an engineer a superengineer. The future belongs to those who understand at a very deep level how to combine their unique expertise with what algorithms do best.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“If you had witnessed life on Earth up to ten thousand years ago, that would not have prepared you for what was to come.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Society is changing, one learning algorithm at a time.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Every algorithm, no matter how complex, can be reduced to just these three operations: AND, OR, and NOT.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The future belongs to those who understand at a very deep level how to combine their unique expertise with what algorithms do best”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Our beliefs are based on our experience, which gives us a very incomplete picture of the world, and it’s easy to jump to false conclusions.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“And then Homo technicus will evolve into a myriad different intelligent species, each with its own niche, a whole new biosphere as different from today's as today's is from the primordial ocean.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“[T]he greatest benefit of machine learning may ultimately be not what the machines learn but what we learn by teaching them.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Tomorrow's cyberspace will be a vast parallel world that selects only the most promising things to try out in the real one. It will be like a new, global subconscious, the collective id of the human race.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“[T]he greatest mystery in the universe is not how it begins or ends, or what infinitesimal threads it's woven from, it's what goes on in a small child's mind: how a pound of gray jelly can grow into the seat of consciousness.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Evolution is the ultimate example of how much a simple learning algorithm can achieve given enough data. Its input is the experience and fate of all living creatures that ever existed. (Now that's big data.) On the other hand, it's been running for over three billion years on the most powerful computer on Earth: Earth itself.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“All knowledge - past, present, and future - can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“[M]achine learning will bring about not just a new era of civilization, but a new stage in the evolution of life on earth.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“How much of your brain does your job use? The more it does, the safer you are.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“what about a model of what makes a hotel good or bad in general, which you could use to rate hotels that currently have few or no reliable reviews? TripAdvisor could learn it, but what about a model of what makes a hotel good or bad for you? This requires information about you that you may not want to share with TripAdvisor. What you’d like is a trusted party that combines the two types of data and gives you the results.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“We could hardly function in society without this ability to intuit and respond to what’s on other people’s minds.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Suppose the entities in Robby’s world fall into five clusters (people, furniture, toys, food, and animals), but we don’t know which things belong to which clusters. This is the type of problem that Robby faces when we switch him on.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Nature” for a computer is the program it runs, and “nurture” is the data it gets.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Everyone will have a detailed model of themselves, and these models will always be talking to each other. (…) Our model will go to millions of meetings so we don’t have to, and by Saturday we will meet the best candidates at a party organized by OkCupid (…). Our digital half will have a model of the world: not just the world at large, but the world as it relates to us. (…) Tomorrow’s cyberspace will be a vast parallel world that chooses only the most promising things to experience in the real world. It will be like a new global subconscious, the collective id of the human race.”

― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The Society of Mind,”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World